lets say North America was never colonized by settlers. if left alone, would Native Americans EVER have technologically advanced? like, if it were 2010, would they STILL be living the exact same way?

why is that? it's a ridiculously complex situation, but... it seems weird that so much of the 'advancement' came from the other side of the world. was there even the right population, resources, know-how, REASON for the native americans to ever advance?

if not... i just don't really understand why the european landmass had such an overwhelmingly different course of history as compared to this side. like, why things panned out this way - as opposed to the Americas bringing ships, industry, and technology across the ocean to the other side, etc..

Europe didn't advance on it's own, it was a combination of Europe, Asia and Africa that got us where we are (for the most part).

watch this:
Guns Germs and Steel

Quote:

Original post by GMuser Europe didn't advance on it's own, it was a combination of Europe, Asia and Africa that got us where we are (for the most part).

right, but the combined Americas are big. really big. so why didn't the sheer "combination" of cultures result over here?

when you say "Europe and Asia", you're really just comparing one giant chunk of land. you could SORT OF make the same comparison to the Americas.

other people have simply told me "because they were tribal, and had no need for it."

but... nearly all civilizations started out this way. they technically didn't NEED it either. but for some reason, they ended up creating technology.

another argument is that the euro/asia lands have always been in wars, so they developed weaponry, which resulted in tech advances.

but.. why weren't the same kind of tribal wars/battles in America escalating the same way? i don't get it. it seems like everyone more or less started the same, but for some reason, the natives here just...never kept advancing.

Quote:

Original post by Grimunlock Quote: Original post by GMuser Europe didn't advance on it's own, it was a combination of Europe, Asia and Africa that got us where we are (for the most part). right, but the combined Americas are big. really big. so why didn't the sheer "combination" of cultures result over here?

Because its much easier for advancements, especially domesticated animals and agriculture to travel parallel to the equator than perpendicular since same distance from the equator equals same climate.

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Original post by Kaze watch this: Guns Germs and Steel

Or even better, read the book.

There are several key reasons why the Americas saw less development from our view point.

First, as Kaze said, agricultural technologies are easier to transport east/west than they are north/south. What worked for crops in Florida sure doesn't work nearly as well in Newfoundland.

Second is that we see evidence of greater trade in Europe/Asia. The Mediterranean Ocean is often suggested as Europe's main reason for technological greatness. Similar climates all around it meant that techs developed that were useful all around it, and once we see sailing it became very easy to move large amounts of materials from place to place, not to mention far easier to travel and get back home.

In the Americas we see trade, but nothing on the scale you had in the Med over similar distances. We do have a great 'water highway' system that gets you nearly anywhere you wanted, but it was far more labor intensive than the sailing options you had else where.

Now the biggest reasons why we don't see the advances we saw in Europe/Asia is that we never had the population booms that lead to more stable settlements and advances in agriculture. In the Americas we had far more nomadic peoples, and these groups developed excellent technologies for their lives. We see them developing a wide range of technologies and art forms that aided them in their lives, but we also lack some of the incentives that pushed and drove development other parts of the world.

We didn't have the well fed population centers that allowed a decent number of people with lots of free time for experimentation pop up all over the Americas, and so this meant that we didn't get a few key developments that allowed other spin offs. After all if no one developed the amazingly complex (But surprisingly simple) science of extracting iron from rocks,... Well then it is very hard to develop complex metal working methods. We do see some iron tools in the Americas, but as far as I know they were mostly meteoric and similar sources of naturally pure iron that was found in very small quantities and worked.

However we also so seem very amazing technologies in the Americas that we don't see else where. We see complex and unique stone working out of South America that doesn't really appear else where. We see more refined stone knapping methods, (which is due to it remaining a prized trade for far longer), some agriculture developments (Maple Syrup anyone?), and lets not forget the birch bark canoe (and the canoe in general).


When you actually compare the complexity of technologies of the time, Europeans really weren't as far ahead when they traveled to the Americas as some would have you believe. They had a few chance advantages that they were able to exploit first.


Technology isn't the tech tree from Civilization. It is seeds that lead to inspiration that give birth to new developments, which in turn plant new seeds. The Americas simply lacked a few of the seeds to build off of at the time, but there is little doubt they would have developed them if they had been given the time.

Ofcoruse they would advance.. if given enough time, they are still fundamentally human.. unless some historical or morphological reason can be given why they wouldn't? By the time of Columbus they were probably 500-1000 years behind Europe tech wise (ie no gunpowder, etc..). South America was slower to develop technologically for numerous reasons already given but in sufficient time, I'm sure the South Americans would have come up with their own indigenous tech matching the Europeans.. They had the concept of 0, advance math (through their astrology) and had already advance to the city/state level of social evolution..

History could have turned out very different upon first contact, if the indigenousness population of the Americas passed a deadly virus to the Europeans as deadly as small pox (ie wiping out 80% of the population in 5 years), we would be asking ourselves if the Europeans would have advance technological if given enough time :) Europe didn't conquer the Americas, they just filled the vacuum left by the collapsing native populations from small pox..

-ddn

Who tells you that the peoples in the americas were not technologically advanced, in the first place? Truth being told, we don't know a lot.

The greedy grievous slaughterers explorers that brought the "primitives" our great knowledge and culture, and more importantly, the only god, destroyed everything that was not made of gold and hanged/burned/otherwise killed anyone who didn't own gold or dig gold and anyone who wasn't ready to believe in the only truth and the only god. They burned all cultural recordings heathen witch stuff that they didn't understand, too.

There's some evidence remaining, although not much, that shows that many of the cultures were in fact not as primitive as one would think and possibly more advanced than their superior conquerors.

The americas (north and south alike) have a long, sad, story of treason, fraud, and murder. The probably biggest mistakes the natives made were being generally friendly and trusting to their guests, and believing in such stupid concepts as honour and decency.
And of course mistaking Cortez for Quetzalcoatl's avatar.

All in all, today we only have the written accounts of people who were provably liars, deceivers, thieves, and mass murderers. Everyone else is long dead and couldn't leave much of a testimony. So, we really don't know much.

"watch this: Guns Germs and Steel"

Recommend reading the book instead -- it's a lot more detailed.

The basic thesis seems relatively sound; that it's Europe/Asias access to more stuff because it's an E-W aligned continent. It's not just crops; it's also animals; we only domesticate a few of the potential food/material producing animals. There are good reasons for this and it turns out that Europe through to China had a good range of them whereas other parts of the world didn't. It's a *good* explanation, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence to support that it's the ONLY one.

There is another factor which is a bit less discussed. And it's simply that Asian/Middle-east settlement happened a long time before the rest of the world apart from Africa.

The "fertile crescent" was the cradle of farming pretty much because it was the first bit of the world that people got to which both required it and allowed it. In Africa, people could live in reasonably dense populations by being hunter/gatherers.

Once populations were established in the middle east, they were basically required to take up farming to support growing numbers; there isn't enough verdant jungle for people to be hunter/gatherers.

But it was several thousand more years until people got round to settling through the Americas and across the Pacific. It's not really surprising that the older locations had more intensive technology such as farming; on the edges of human colonisation there was no pressure to force people to invent new food production. They could just move further down the coast or inland a bit more.

For a comparison of how long that human settlement took to fill the world; the oldest college at Cambridge University dates from the late 1200s. The *earliest* archeologically justifiable date of colonisation of New Zealand is about the same time. Britain had a reasonable stable farming ecology because it had to have having been settled for maybe 10,000 years by that point.

Whereas New Zealand represented a vast stockpile of unharvested wild food sources for the newly arriving colonists without them needing to faff about digging fields.

Which leads me really to wonder who went back? Who got back in the boat and travelled across a thousand miles of ocean AGAIN to tell the others he'd found rich hunting lands and tell them how to get there? There's a guy to admire.